Teresa Wood and I were visiting in the San Francisco Bay Area
when we heard on the noontime news of the attack on Luna (see
Luna - Illegally Cut and Endangered
by Dana Stolzman). Having visited Julia Butterfly Hill
in Luna twice during her tree-sit, we were devastated by the
report.

A few days later we found ourselves in Redway, up in Humboldt
County. Unaware of the nationwide effort already underway to
come up with a plan to stabilize and protect Luna, we walked
into the Circle of Life Foundation's office to offer our help.
Due to our work in South America constructing canopy
walkways in the rainforest, we had a lot of experience supporting
large trees with steel guying cables. It seemed to us that this
would be a good, non-invasive solution to help keep Luna upright
in the face of the strong winter winds she would soon be experiencing.

Dana Stolzman, the foundation's director, listened to our
idea, then explained the efforts already underway by the team
of arborists, engineers, foresters, and biologists that had been
assembled. While she began contacting the key people involved
in the effort, Teresa and I, along with FEN director Jonathan
Carter (coincidentally also in the area) and local activist Sawyer
headed up to Stafford for a first hand look at the damage done
to Luna.

Jonathan Carter and Sawyer inspecting the damage to Luna. Photo by Paul Donahue.

Despite having seen all the pictures on the news, the first
sight of the deep cut in Luna's trunk sickened us. We were last
at Luna a year and a half earlier, and at that point she was
a healthy, thriving tree. Now her massive trunk had been cut
more than two-thirds of the way through. On top of that, her
trunk was visually marred by six large braces that had been hastily
put in place to stabilize the tree for the short term.

After getting over the shock of seeing the damage, we examined
Luna for her cabling possibilities and it looked like our idea
would work. It took Dana 24 hours to contact all the key players
in Luna's medical team (Dennis Yniguez, the President of the
American Society of Consulting Arborists and the coordinator
of the Luna medical team was at a conference in Rhode Island),
but eventually we were given a green light by Julia and the team
to carry out our plan.

The next day we were headed back up to Luna to start the cabling
work, riding in the back of an orange Pacific Lumber (PL) pickup
truck with one of their "compliance foresters" at the
wheel. Despite having been frustrasted in their logging efforts
for more than two years by Julia's tree-sit, the company was
cooperating in the protection effort for the tree, eager to see
the story disappear from the news as soon as possible.

It was a surreal experience, to say the least. When we'd last
visited Julia a year and a half ago, we kept off PL's gravel
logging roads and took trails through the woods to avoid PL personnel.
Riding in the pickup with us today were Sawyer and Duff, two
local forest activists and tree-climbers with the Mattole
Forest Defenders who only a couple of days earlier had been
battling PL and Humboldt County Sherriff's deputies on Rainbow
Ridge, just a scant seven miles to the southwest of Luna. The
gravel road up to Luna took us through PL clearcuts of all conditions
- impossibly steep, naked, eroded hillsides where not a single
plant had grown since our last visit in June 1999, clearcuts
with scrubby orange vegetation killed by herbicide spray, and
other clearcuts still black and smoking from the Napalm dropped
to burn off the slash. From high on the ridge above Luna we had
a clear view of the blight of PL's patchwork clearcuts covering
the landscape. Most bizarre of all, the whole time we were working
to save a single tree we could hear the roar of a large twin-bladed
Chinook helicopter coursing over the steep slopes across the
Eel River from us, hauling out huge tree trunks in a PL helicopter
logging operation.

That first day, due to a shortage of both time and needed
climbing gear, we accomplished very little. We returned much
better equipped the next morning, accompanied by redwood canopy
biologist Dr. Steve Sillett of Humboldt State University, Jim
Spickler, a graduate student and fellow redwood researcher at
HSU, civil engineer Steve Salzman, videomaker Thomas Dunklin
(to document the work), and Sanctuary Forest director Eric Goldsmith.

Due to Steve and Jim's extensive experience in rigging large
Coast Redwoods, we were able to get up into Luna fairly quickly.
Once we had lugged the mountain of gear down to the base of Luna,
Jim used a 70-lb. pull bow to shoot an arrow and light line high
into Luna's crown. It took several shots, but within 20 minutes
or so we had a line into the crown. With that light line, a heavier
line was pulled up, then the heavier line was used to pull up
a climbing rope. Once the the climbing rope was anchored, Jim,
Steve Sillett, and I put on harnesses and climbed up into Luna.

Jim Spickler at 110 feet in Luna attaching a collar around her trunk. Photo by Paul Donahue.

We were up in Luna until later afternoon, securing a huge
collar of steel cable around her trunk about 110 feet above the
ground. The collar serves as the attachment point for three steel
cable guy lines that run back to the hillside behind the tree.
While we were at work up in Luna, Steve Salzman crawled around
on the steep hillside above her to locate suitable anchor points
for the steel guying cables. Our last task of the day was to
use a crossbow to shoot light lines down to the ground anchors
that Steve had located. These lines would eventually be used
to pull the guying cables up into Luna.

Newly-installed collar of 1/2
inch steel cable at about 110 feet in Luna, with the wooden spacer
blocks to keep the cable from cutting into her trunk, and the
thimbles for the guying cables down to the ground. Photo by Paul
Donahue.

About ten days later, after Teresa and I had returned to Maine,
Steve, Jim and Steve went back up to Luna to complete the job,
attaching the three steel guy cables. Luna seems to have made
it through this winter, and it's hoped by all that the cables
will help keep Luna standing for many years to come as a beacon
to forest activists around the world.